Tron has risen from $0.22 to a recent high of $0.28 on trading volumes of $400 million, sending its market cap to $1.7 billion.

South Korea is currently leading Tron’s price action, without any premium. No other fiat trading pairs are noticeable, with tron so trading only against other cryptos and South Korean fiat.

Tron’s recent price action, October 2018.

This jump of about 10% is due to the now imminent launch of Tron’s Virtual Machine (TVM) which appears to be a copy paste of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM). They say:

“All smart contracts on EVM are executable on TVM. By connecting seamlessly to existing development ecosystem, higher efficiency can be achieved by developers.

Needless to learn a new programming language, they can use mainstream programming languages for smart contracts such as Solidity to develop, debug and compile smart contracts in the Remix environment, which greatly reduces development costs.”

They say dapps on tron would be cheaper because of their use of another copy paste, the EOS consensus system, which uses “bandwidth” as a cost measure.

Similar to gas in ethereum, bandwidth is needed for transactions. In tron you get about 25 free transactions, then you have to stake trx to get more bandwidth.

That means a dapp would need to stake a lot of trx to handle tens of thousands of transactions, so whether this is really cheaper when taken holistically, is not very clear.

We’ll see soon enough with a vote currently on-going as the 27 tron Block Producing (BP) admin nodes decide to upgrade the network.

The public can not currently see this vote in progress, but admin nodes can, with one of them sharing the below image.

BP’s vote on Tron’s TVM, October 2018.

We’re told ten admin nodes have voted in favor at the time of writing, with 2/3rd needed, or 18 nodes.

Justin Sun, Tron’s founder, is himself an admin node. According to a block explorer, he has “mined” 86,243. Blocks in tron run at 32 trx every 3 seconds.

Meaning Sun has “mined” 2,759,776 trx since end of June, worth about $72,000 or circa $20,000 a month.

Some 921,600 trx is mined everyday by the 27 admin nodes, translating to 336 million trx a year on top of the current circa 65 billion circulating trx.

Tron founder and other block producers, October 2018.

As you can see, Huobi is an admin node in Tron. They were recently caught colluding in EOS, with documents detailing mutual voting and sharing of proceeds from producing blocks.

As the set-up in tron is pretty much identical, it may be the same is occurring there. Making their blockchain a somewhat semi-centralized network where token holders have limited recourse as exchanges, like Huobi, usually hold a great deal of tokens. Thus can vote themselves in and can collude with other admin nodes to keep them voted.

Tron’s compatibility to ethereum’s EVM is however interesting, but ethereum’s EVM is now being upgraded to eWASM, so even at the protocol level tron is somewhat behind.

More generally, while some try to compare blockchains to MySpace and Facebook, in Tron’s case it may be more like Google and Yahoo. Yahoo, of course, could never outcompete Google Search by basically copying Google. Likewise it is unclear how tron can outcompete ethereum by copying eth.

It remains to be seen thus how it all develops, but it clearly appears the blockchain space is getting more and more competitive.